Let Them Eat Carbon
Entrenching Poverty by Limiting Fossil Fuel Investment Won’t Solve Climate Change
MAR 29, 2022
Poor countries are already paying for the carbon emissions of advanced industrialized economies—through floods, droughts, and typhoons. Now, if the wealthy countries have their way, the poor could be forced to cough up even more, this time thanks to ill-conceived policies that will inhibit growth and do little to address climate change. That can’t be allowed to happen.
The poorest 64 countries, home to almost a quarter of the world’s population, are not major contributors to carbon emissions. That is likely to remain the case for some time. For these countries, economic growth, including access to energy, is essential to poverty reduction and perhaps the most important method for building resilience to climate change.
Central to that growth is low-cost financing from multilateral development banks such as the World Bank. In recent years, these organizations have increasingly focused on linking finance to climate adaptation and mitigation. This has benefits, but if not done carefully, could also force the poorest countries to make bad or expensive choices that help neither their citizens nor the planet.
Buying Climate Resilience
https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-16-spring-2022/let-them-eat-carbon
